Cimetière Des Champeaux De Montmorency
History
Montmorency and the Grande Émigration
At the end of the 18th-century the Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania ceased to be a sovereign state. It was partitioned in three stages between three neighbouring empires, the Russian Empire, Prussia and Austria-Hungary. While during Napoleon's passage to Russia a statelet attached to the First French Empire, called the Duchy of Warsaw, was briefly in existence, the Congress of Vienna turned it in 1815 into Congress Poland. It was a notionally semi-autonomous province and a fraction of the previous autonomous state, such that it was a monarchy in personal union with the Russian empire and the tsar was known as "King of Poland". However, the tyranny of tsar Nicholas I incited the Poles to stage a planned insurrection which began in November 1830, formed an interim Polish government under prince Czartoryski, and spread to all parts of the former Commonwealth under Russian rule well into the following year. It was brutally put down by Russia, resulting in thousands of deaths, imprisonment, confiscation of property and exile to Siberia. Many of the dissidents who managed to evade those outcomes, escaped to Western Europe, including the Italian and German states, Switzerland and the United Kingdom, with a majority settling in France where they were dubbed the Grande Emigration, with Czartoryski among them.
While in the 19th-century resettled Poles conducted their political and intellectual lives in Paris, they favoured Enghien-les-Bains as a holiday destination and Delfina Potocka opened a second salon at the spa to entertain guests to Chopin's piano recitals and hear the works of poets such as Juliusz Słowacki and Zygmunt Krasiński.
Wall of Remembrance
The cemetery is a place of remembrance for the Polish nation, of liberty and of the right to self-determination.
The Wall of Remembrance honours the memory of the Polish Armed Forces in the West and the Katyn massacre, the Massacres of Poles in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia (1943–1945), during World War II, and of the dissident union Solidarność (1980s). The history of the cemetery became synonymous with the history of Poland during the 20th-century. It has received the bodies of insurgents and of deportees. Soil from Katyn has been deposited there. In the 1960s, the cemetery became a place of resistance to Communist Poland. People who declined to return to Poland while under occupation or under martial law chose to be buried there.
Some notable burials
- Joseph Babinski (1857–1952), neurologist
- Bolesław Biegas (1877–1954), painter and sculptor
- Olga Boznańska (1865–1940), painter
- Aleksander Chodźko (1804–1891), orientalist, writer
- Adam Jerzy Czartoryski, (1770–1861), statesman
- Henryk Dembiński (1791–1864), general
- Cyprien Godebski (1835–1909), sculptor
- Antoni Gorecki (1787–1861), poet
- Aleksander Jełowicki (1804–1877), insurgent, editor, poet, priest
- Teodor Jełowicki (1828–1905), politician, musician, philanthropist
- Zygmunt Kaczkowski (1825–1896), poet
- Marya Kasterska (1893–1969), writer, journalist
- Aleksander Kawałkowski (1899–1965), officer and diplomat
- Karol Kniaziewicz (1762–1842), general, politician
- Tadeusz Makowski (1882–1932), painter
- Ludwik Mękarski (1843–1923), engineer
- Adam Mickiewicz (1798–1855), poet and writer (repatriated to Wawel Castle in 1890)
- Julian Ursyn Niemcewicz (1757–1841), statesman and poet
- Antoni Oleszczyński (1774–1879), painter
- Cyprian Kamil Norwid (1821–1883), artist, poet dramatist
- Władysław Oleszczyński (1807–1866), sculptor
- Bronisław Piłsudski (1866–1918), anthropologist, ethnographer
- Helena Paderewska (1856–1934), social activist, wife of Ignacy Paderewski
- Roman Palester (1907–1989), musical composer
- Edward Pożerski-Pomian (1875–1964), medical researcher
- Kazimierz Sosnkowski (1885–1969), general, politician
- Aleksander Wat (1900–1967), writer
- Władysław Zamoyski (1803–1868), general, Crimean War veteran, politician
See also
References
- ^ Skowronek, Jerzy; Bochenek, Alicja; Cichowski, Marek (1986). Filipow, Krzysztof (ed.). Cmentarz polski w Montmorency (in Polish). Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy.
- ^ Kałuski, Marian (February 2007). "Francja: Polacy w Paryżu" (PDF). Pro Polonicum – Polonijne pismo patriotyczne o polskich znakach pamięci na Obczyźnie. Vol. 5. pp. 44–45. ISSN 1661-7061. Retrieved 2012-01-07.
- ^ "Polski cmentarz w Montmorency i polskie groby w Paryżu". polonia.wp.pl (in Polish). 2007-10-29. Retrieved 2012-01-07.